‘If you don’t hear one, don’t worry another will be along soon’, was the philosophy pop used to revolve around in the days before algorithms and smart speakers.
Back then you couldn’t move for catchy songs in major keys, choruses you could yell, middle eights and cute little guitar solos. Welcome to the world of mass consumption.
Brighton quartet Fur appeared to still be clutching that memo over twenty-five years past its eat by date when in 2017 they scored a completely unexpected coup after uploading their first single If You Know That I’m Lonely to YouTube.
Suddenly, from playing compact and bijou hometown venue Sticky Mike’s Frog Bar, the band – William Murray, guitarist Harry Saunders, bassist William ‘Tav’ Taverner and drummer Flynn Whelan – were getting offers to play venues twenty times its size, from exotic places like Indonesia. So far, the distinctly Beatles sounding tune has piled up streams in the tens of millions.
Critics snarked about blatant attempts to surf the AI waves to glory (an accompanying video with the lads doing a passable Monkees impression didn’t help) but when you’re hot, you’re hot, right?
Well, wrong. Sort of. It’s taken four years to get from that overnight success to getting their debut album out, but Murray and co. have remained sanguine about it, releasing the lo-fi stopgap Facing Home mixtape in 2020, and now arriving here in an assured, collective state of mind.
They wisely choose not to include their millstone/moneymaker (depending on your perspective) amongst the eleven tracks here, but anyone expecting radical departures (or anything you could class as radical at all) has on this basis definitely confused their Radios One and Two.
No matter though, because when you’re sort of writing for all the people who only know one of your songs the job is to gently wean them off the Abbey Road-isms of your past, and for the most part When You Walk Away does the job nicely.
Perhaps illustrating the dilemma they faced, the title-track comes in two renditions, one at the beginning and then again at the end. Part 1 (hey, this is what they called it) is a jangle overture which appears to have spent some time in close proximity to an early Strokes record, but satisfies neatly enough.
Last but not least, the Cast-esque second stanza boldly embraces environmental issues by recycling the chords from its twin but winds its way downtempo and lasts a climactic five minutes plus; with a trace of sax to round things out, it’s also comfortably the better version of the two.
The rest sounds like feeding tokens into an indie jukebox; Anybody Else But Me is so sugary your dentist would probably warn you about it whilst To Be Next To Her and She’s The Warmest Colour Of My Life still have Alan McGee on hold. The wistful strum of No Good For You provides a moment of introspection, but What I Am’s icky retro-gloop never escapes the box with token written on it.
So, is this all this a plan, or just dumb luck? Fur reckon that it’s down to fate, saying: ‘There’s something looking over us – a natural development of patience and how we perceive things.’
When You Walk Away is just about good enough to make you care which, but a hit factory needs better finished articles than this.
